


The Love You Breathe

by AetherAria



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: (i guess??????), (lol), Alternate Universe - Pirate, Lizard Kissin' Tuesday, Magic, Mild Blood, Mild Peril, Minor Injuries, Mutual Pining, Other, Penumbra Pride Week, Penumbra Pride Week Day 3, Second Citadel (Penumbra Podcast), categorized as 'other' bc arum is nonbinary when i write him bye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-14 10:22:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19271305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AetherAria/pseuds/AetherAria
Summary: The end of Moonlit Hermit, if Arum was a sea monster instead of a lizard, the Keep was a coral structure in the deep dark of the ocean, and Rilla was still... Rilla.





	The Love You Breathe

**Author's Note:**

> The Penumbra Pride Week prompt for the day was Affection/Kisses, and since I already pretty much wrote out ALL my thoughts about How The Lizard Kisses in my other fic, 'each kiss to lip and cheek', this was what came out instead. I've been yelling about this Second Citadel Pirate au on tumblr for like a month and a half now, and instead of like... writing it in order like a normal human, this happened. The summary pretty much gives all the context I think you need, but if you care at all about context you can check the tag on my blog here for the general gist of the au: [jakkubrat.tumblr.com/tagged/second-citadel-pirate-au]. Also, I mostly based sea monster!Arum on a coral snake, and those DEFFO don't have gills, but he's also partially inspired by a specific kind of aquatic salamander that keeps gills into adulthood, and I don't care about rules. :3
> 
> Name from the song Underwater, by MIKA.

Point the first: it is good that the Keep is now in slumber, because it means the Keep can begin to heal.

Point the second: it is unfortunate that the Keep is now in slumber, because it means there is no longer any active magic maintaining the bubbles of (breathable, necessary) air in Arum’s workshop, and as a consequence there is now water lapping at Rilla and Arum’s toes.

Arum glances down, brow furrowed in vague irritation, but then his eyes widen in panic as they flick up towards Rilla.

“Uhhh,” Rilla says, and the water is coming quicker, now, pouring around her ankles, rising alarmingly towards her knees. “A-Arum?”

“ _Keep_ ,” Arum says, voice sharp and strained, but there is no answer, no cessation of the inflow of ocean. He reaches a hand towards Rilla, and when he grips her wrist she twists her hand to grab his in return, her instrument dropping forgotten into the frothing water. “Keep-”

“It’s not gonna wake up, Arum,” she says, eyes wide. “That exhausted- it’s going to be out for a _while_. Can we- could I- _dammit_ , there’s no way I could get to the surface before- and even if I did, the damned bends would probably-”

Arum darts his gaze around wildly, combing through his quickly-submerging, chaos-strewn workshop for something, _anything_ that could help, but-

But Arum has never been tasked to create something for the purpose of _saving_ a human. Nothing his hands have made would do anything but hasten Amaryllis’ death.

If she were only made as Arum is, he thinks desperately, water rising until they are both floating, feet leaving the workshop floor. If she could only slip between the air and the waves as easily as he-

 _Oh_ , he thinks. _Oh, of course_.

He can save her. He can keep Amaryllis from drowning, in this place where he he has forced her, alone in the darkest depths with only a monster for company. He can _save_ her from the death of which he is the certain cause. It will only require that he gives to her a part of himself.

(Arum wonders, vaguely, if he has not done so already.)

The water is rushing in too fast, and Arum does not have time to think of an alternative solution. There is only this; he grits his teeth, hisses a dismayed curse, and meets Rilla’s eyes as the gap of air between the two of them and the ceiling quickly shrinks.

“I can- I can help you breathe, if you allow me,” he says, his voice a rapid-fire staccato. “It will not be- _pleasant_.”

“It can’t be less pleasant than _drowning_ , Arum,” Rilla says, glancing up at the approaching ceiling and clinging to Arum’s arm to keep the frothing influx of water from pushing her under preemptively. “If you have an idea, I’m all ears, here.”

He lifts two hands, and she does not flinch when he cups her face in them, and this close he can just barely make out the difference between her pupils and the near-black of her irises. Her brow furrows - confusion, not distrust - and she waits for him to explain. There is no time, though, and the water is lapping up over her chin already, less than a foot of air between Amaryllis and death. Arum opens his mouth, and in the last moments of air he says, simply, “Trust, Amaryllis.”

She sucks in a breath before the water rises over her mouth, her nose. With her face in his hands she nods, her eyes fixed on his, and then the water slips over them entirely.

Arum exhales the last of the air in his lungs in a billow of silvery bubbles, and then grimaces as his gills pull open, sucking in a breath of sea. Rilla holds her breath, her eyes screwed closed against the salt, still allowing him to hold her face in his hands, and Arum knows that there will be consequences for this. He knows that, but when he tries to measure the weight of her life against his own-

He cannot comprehend a different choice.

It has been ages since Arum has tried to work magic like this, but there is something natural in the act that makes it feel easy. He closes his teeth on the side of his tongue and blood ribbons out into the water, already electric with the magic of desire, with the force of Arum’s will, and then he carefully, gently tilts Amaryllis’ head back, all the way back, angling her head slightly to the right. She allows him this, eyes still closed, expression determined, and he had asked her for _trust_ but he hadn’t held any real hope that she would be capable of giving it to him, not really. Not like _this_.

There is no time to contemplate, though. His window is slipping, and humans can only hold their breath for so long.

Arum focuses. He focuses on his will, on his blood, on his very nature. He opens his mouth wide, tilting his head, and then he slowly, carefully closes his jaws around Amaryllis’ fragile throat. _Pinpricks_ , he thinks. His tongue is throbbing where he’s pierced it open, but from her, he will only require droplets. She makes a noise when his teeth press into her neck, muffled soft, but she doesn’t try to lower her head, or to push him away.

The smallest drops of blood slip out from four minuscule wounds, two on each side of her neck, and mingle with the saltwater and then with Arum’s own blood, and where they meet there is sudden, sparking light. Arum pours himself out, pours his will into the water, into their mingling blood, into Amaryllis, and he thinks, _breathe, breathe_ -

The pinprick wounds on her neck flare bright, frothing and fizzling as Arum’s desperation sketches new lines across her skin, and Amaryllis suddenly has gills to match his own, and when she automatically draws in a fitful pull of water through the new openings and her eyes flutter open to meet his own, he drops his hands from her cheeks to her shoulders and thinks, _something monstrous in her eyes, something monstrous that I put there, oh Universe protect-_

But then she is touching her gills, inspecting them with a look of shock - not displeasure - and then staring up at him and breathing, breathing as he does, even and easy and for the moment safe.

Now that it is still, the ocean having finished its violent entrance, the ambient bioluminescence lights up the water from the inside, filling the space with an eerie, rippling glow that dances hypnotically across Arum’s striped scales. The way he is looking at her- it is almost more wild than what he has done. The way he is looking at her… it is making it difficult to think of his mouth on her skin as anything other than a kiss. Rilla’s heart is pounding, and she knows without a doubt that it is more from Arum’s hands, Arum’s teeth upon her, than from her brush with drowning.

“Amaryllis,” he says, and his voice ripples too, thick and humming and uncanny in her ears, and his hands are still on her shoulders and her sides, and the water is not rushing anymore, but Rilla’s head stills spins. “Amaryllis, are you…”

Her chest feels heavy with the water in her lungs, breathing this way is slow and strange, and when she speaks her her voice draws wide and wavering.

“Arum.”

His name in her voice is a pearl, a pain and an animosity transmuted into something strange and shift-shining and beautiful, something hidden but bright, and through the green-blue water Arum feels it like something stuck behind his ribs. She is looking at him with a wonder he cannot stand. He does not deserve- he _saved_ her, in technicality, but she would not have needed saving in the first place were it not for him. His choices, his failings. She is… Amaryllis is…

Arum has the distinct impression that if he asked her to stay, right now in this moment, she would understand what he truly meant. She might even consider it, for a moment.

That is why he knows that he cannot ask.

That is why he knows that he must now let her go.


End file.
